The present disclosure relates to methods of detecting gaseous contaminants that cause corrosion and apparatuses for effecting the same.
Corrosion is a common issue in aeronautic industry, clean rooms, paper industry, waste water treatment plant, and many other industrial facilities. In an illustrative example, data centers employing mission critical Information Technology infrastructures and computers are geographically spanning around the world to provide faster access to users. Some of such data centers are located in geographical areas rich in sulphurous gaseous contaminations. Many hardware failures associated with silver and copper corrosion of thin film resistors, power switches and/or circuit boards components at such geographical areas are well known. Detection of gaseous corrosive contaminants is, therefore, necessary to anticipate, and to take preventive steps for, corrosion of computer hardware at areas susceptible to corrosion through gaseous corrosive contaminants.
Current commonly used corrosion detection techniques rely on weight measurement of silver and copper coupons due to simplicity and ease. Corrosion detection technique known in the art is not sensitive enough to detect corrosion rates under 10 nm per month, and requires an extensive exposure time in a corrosive environment. The result provided by coupon measurements provides a weighted corrosion rate over an extended period of time without specifically pointing to temporal variation of the corrosion in the data centers.
In order to provide improved corrosion sensitivity, the corrosion product has to produce a sizeable change in the detection signal. In case of resistive technique, where change in resistance due to thickness film variation is measured as the film is exposed to the corrosive environment, the thickness of a metallic film needs to be sufficiently small such that the thickness of a corroded portion of a metallic film is significant relative to a total film thickness. However, the thickness of the metallic film in prior art corrosion detectors is constrained by the lifetime of the corrosion detectors. Specifically, corrosion detectors are designed to be operational over a significant period of time without requiring replacement. In practical terms, replacing corrosion sensors every month or two in order to obtain high sensitivity is an expensive and time consuming proposition, and is not a practicable solution.
Additional requirements for effective corrosion sensors relates to separation of the corrosion effect from fluctuation of temperature and humidity and mechanically robustness so that the performance of the corrosion sensors is not affected by disturbances caused by strong air streams commonly encountered in data center environments. Furthermore, there is demand for real time corrosion detectors that can assess both the indoor and outdoor environment.